1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to electronic devices and in particular to input components for electronic devices. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to use of mobile devices as input mechanisms for electronic devices.
2. Description of the Related Art
Portable electronic devices, such as mobile (or cellular) phones, have become standard equipment used by a growing number of people throughout the world for voice communication, and more recently for text-based communication (i.e., text messaging). With the popularity of cell phones being utilized to compose text messages and also provide other (non-text) character entry, one problem that had to be overcome was that of providing full access to the complete range of language characters (textual, numeric, and others) required to convey a message in some languages. As an example, the limited space (surface area) allocated for the keypad on most mobile devices is not sufficient to include the wide range of different characters utilized in the Chinese language.
Because of the difficulty in recognizing and inputting Chinese characters, many computing devices that are utilized by Chinese speakers require the user to purchase a separate piece of PC hardware if the user desires to input Chinese language characters. Alternatively, some users may purchase specialized software that allows the selection of Chinese characters from a display on the computer device. Both the use of a separate PC hardware device and specialized software requires a great investment in capital, making them both unattractive to a normal every day user of a computer device.
Even with standard computer devices (e.g., home PCs or laptops), the standard keyboards provided do not completely support on-line Chinese character input, which is among the more difficult languages to input because of the use of hundreds of different characters (or associated strokes) in the Chinese language.
One conventional method provided to enable use of standard computer equipment to enter Chinese characters requires the computer user (or owner) to purchase a separate software program that has a special input device, which is available at a relatively high price. Also, there are a few other input methods that require special input devices to record the strokes associated with the software packages. However, these software packages and input devices are generally very expensive for common computer users, and thus most users are unable or unwilling to buy these expensive packages in order to access the functionality of inputting the Chinese characters, particularly when the convenience of this functionality is simply for causal and/or infrequent use.
In addition to the high costs, the conventional methods provide an input speed that is much slower than the special input techniques available, such as for Pinyin (simplified/traditional Chinese). Still some other techniques require the user to memorize a substantial amount of code to be able to program simply character inputs. Also, in addition to the cost and slow input speeds, another problem with finding a solution to this problem is that the Chinese people speak many different dialects and thus, a vast majority of Chinese people are not able to handle Pinyin very well and would not be comfortable (or efficient) using this input method.
Thus, without incurring the high costs of specialized software and/or special input devices for their computer, the average computer users is unable to input Chinese language characters on a desktop or laptop computer system.
As noted above, in addition to the high proliferation of computing devices, and even higher proliferation exists with mobile phones and personal devices, such as PDAs. Many people are willing to spend the money required to purchase a new cell phone, given the phones portability and the quick access to voice, data, text and other communication methods the phone provides. Many people with computer devices at home also own a cell phone or other portable electronic device with which they communicate while mobile.
Traditionally, most of these portable devices are designed with a standard keypad with basic text and numeric character input buttons. One technology offering with some portable devices, which was initially made popular by personal digital assistants (PDAs), such as Palm®, is that of touch screen input devices. With touch screen input devices, a user is able to utilize his fingers, a stylus or other pointed instrument to enter textual input and making selections of options/features that are displayed on the device's visual display. The entered information is then recognized as text or other input (selection), as would a normal input via a keypad or keyboard. In some instances, the characters of the keypad/keyboard are provided as a virtual keypad/keyboard within the touch screen display and the characters may then be selected suing the selection mechanism (finger, stylus, etc.).
Touch screen/touch pad technology has been incorporated into several cell phones designs, most recently in the iPhone®, a product of Apple Computers. Users of these types of cell phones (or other portable devices enabled with touch screen input) typically make selections and compose text on their cell phones using the touch screen.
The proliferation of cell-phone usage across the world, including in China, for example, has made handwriting recognition attractive again, due to the limited keypad of the cell phone and very popular usage of short messaging. PDA-phones with touch screens and Cell-phones with finger writing capabilities are becoming commonplace with Chinese business users. Such technology provides users with a continuity of experience across devices that utilize/support finger-writing technology. Three other advantages are provided by the finger writing technology over solutions that use dedicated interfaces attached to each user device. First, finger writing technology allows user mobility, while providing input that is not tethered to a recipient device, such as usage with a television. Second, finger writing technology enables multiple users to provide concurrent input to the same device, such as with multi-user editing or querying applications for a common device like a television. Third, the mobile device (e.g., cell phone) is essentially an intelligent and personal device that has rich context information. The availability of this rich context information can be leveraged to further enhance the user experience when using this capability with other devices that do not have the same capabilities. (e.g., text completion or predictive texting).